Best practices for creating a Crystal Report for export into Excel

Crystal Report is notoriously difficult with preserving the exact format into Excel, especially for complex reports with multiple subreports and suppressed sections. However, there are a few standard best practices for designing the Crystal Report in order to reproduce a closer copy of the report format.

Article
Number:55588

Products:

Crystal_Reports

Make all objects in the same row and same column the same size (Ctrl+Click all objects, right click, select Size, Same Size)

Remove any spaces between fields/objects in the report

Suppress all blank sections

In Crystal Reports 8.5 right click any section and select Format Section. Unmark Free Form Placement on all report sections to improve the export to Excel. Unmarking that option will force you to place objects in your report in a grid of rows, and this will export more cleanly to Excel.

Set your printer settings (File, Page Setup, Paper Size) to a wide page size (example: A3 landscape). This can give extra columns that may be needed for the Excel Export. (You do not need to have the wide physical printer on your network.)

Exporting to Excel creates extra row between each valid row of data

When a Crystal Report has a "Details a" and "Details b" section with each being conditionally suppressed, the following issue may occur after exporting to Excel.